Wolfram Alpha got nerdlingers all tizzied up recently. It’s a new search engine whose aim is, modestly, to use its mad clevah algorithmix to “make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything.”

What that means, as far as I can tell, is that Wolfram Alpha uses mathematics - previously thought to be our enemy, remember - to solve every question ever to plop out of the human dome.

Now clearly, the only questions we’re really interested in are those posed by pop stars through the ages. Questions like:

What becomes of the broken-hearted?

Who needs love like that?

Dancing at the disco bumper to bumper, wait a minute, where’s me jumper?

Excited at the prospect of finally having such queries answered, I probed Wolfram Alpha to within an inch of its bespectacled life. The results might politely be termed “mixed”.

Continue reading »

Posted by Stuart Waterman on Monday June 1st, 2009 at 9:00 am

[image: Evan Roth for F.A.T]

This is a guest post from the hella witty Kate Solomon:

Kanye West, it

Posted by Stuart Waterman on Friday May 15th, 2009 at 1:29 pm

It’s a generally accepted fact that Courtney Love is battier than a big bat stew created in the Bat Cave from the battered remains of Batman, Nora Batty, David Batty and Batfink, mixed together with a cricket bat by Mike Batt, while Os Mutantes’ “Bat Macumba” plays in the background.

However it wasn’t until she stumbled into the world of social media, and started “enagaging directly with fans” (aka “providing easy stories for bloggers”), that we started to get fresh daily doses of Love.

First there was MySpace, but who had the endurance to read all those witterings, presented as they were sans spell-check, paragraphs, punctuation or rational thought?

Much nicer to get your Courtney in bite-size slices, as served up by 2009′s fave online timesuck, Twitter.

Nicer, but alas, no more comprehensible. I mean, really, what can you do with this?:

“real friend i dont pay” i should have just gotten raped bythe “interior decorator” as its costing ten times more than if i had!

One evening, as I sat whittling on my porch, I started wondering if perhaps Courtney’s tweets contained some kind of frothy-mouthed code which just required breaking in order to unleash the truth bombs contained thereinabouts.

Something in the syntax, the phrasing, the spelling and my own boredom told me that I should definitely try feeding Courtney Love’s Twitter updates through Babelfish Translator to see if they started to make any more sense.
Continue reading »

Posted by Stuart Waterman on Thursday May 7th, 2009 at 12:30 pm

Can you believe some people deride social news sites like Reddit as playgrounds for childish, overgrown adolescents?

See the whole thing here.

Posted by Stuart Waterman on Wednesday April 22nd, 2009 at 9:00 am

As you’ll be aware, we are now experiencing a post-Boyle entertainment landscape. Pre-Boyle, it was a commonly-held belief that non-pretty people were unable to sing - it was thought that the sheer weight of their ugly faces meant their mouths could not be held open long enough to complete a song.

Susan Boyle’s Britain’s Got Talent performance has opened the world’s eyes to the fact that, somehow, a beautiful voice can emerge from a middle-aged Scottish virgin lacking the physical traits of conventional attractiveness.

Imagine that! Looks have nothing to do with talent!
Continue reading »

Posted by Stuart Waterman on Monday April 20th, 2009 at 9:00 am

Have you heard of Omegle? It’s kind of like dogging, but without the, er, sex and car parks. You go on there and like *that*, you’re thrown into an instant message conversation with a randomly-selected stranger.

And unless you swap details, the conversation remains anonymous. Cool, right? I dunno. It was cool a week ago for a couple of minutes, anyway.

I went on to Omegle because I couldn’t quite work out the public’s perception of Lady Sovereign. Is she cool? Cheeky? “Vibrant”? Or just a wee gum-chewing guttersnipe chancer? Also, she did a song called “Random” once. Omegle’s random. You know?
Continue reading »

Posted by Stuart Waterman on Tuesday April 7th, 2009 at 10:20 am

Posted by Stuart Waterman on Thursday January 29th, 2009 at 12:16 pm

U2 have a new single coming out in February called “Get On Your Boots”, but it was unleashed onto the internet last week for people to decide whether it’s any good or not (you can listen to it here).

Me, I refuse to form opinions about U2 songs anymore. There’s no point. There would be as much point forming an opinion about wood, or air. Nothing I do will change its existence, or the fact it will be very popular.

But it can’t just be ignored, either. So, as a compromise, I handed reviewing duties over to My Chemical Toilet’s music-savvy Twitter followers.

Bless them, they took time out from commenting on their lunch and attempting to get Jonathan Ross‘s attention to drop their mind-bombs, which you can see exploding all over the page after the jump.

Continue reading »

Posted by Stuart Waterman on Monday January 26th, 2009 at 11:00 am